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"When they allow a talk show host to play them like a two-dollar banjo, they demonstrate what kind of backbone they'll bring to the job later on, if we elect them. After they get elected will they continue to allow Jeff Crank to put a nickel in them and wind them up every Saturday morning?"

Barry Noreen, former columnist, Colorado Springs Gazette

Wednesday, March 30, 2011

THE HAMMER OF WITCHES

BY

ROBERT HARKINS

In 1787, American delegates met at Philadelphia and drafted a constitution that would replace the unworkable Articles of Confederation. Federalist Alexander Hamilton argued that the new constitution should designate a “President for Life”, one vested with the power to veto all Congressional legislation; thankfully, he was voted down.This same American Constitution finally prohibited by the incorporation of the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights, the suppression of free speech.

Since then, the Supreme Court has frustrated efforts by liberals and “conservatives” to qualify, suppress, regulate or, according to a new theory invented by Justice Eleanor Kagan, “redistribute” free speech. From the beginning, the Supreme Court, with a few shameful exceptions during the Adams and Wilson Administrations, protected popular, religious and ideological speech.The government could not punish, condemn or banish the citizen from his society simply because he spoke his mind—even if as my Grandfather Charlie used to say— his opinion wasn’t worth a “plugged nickel.”United States Supreme Court Justice Hugo Blackmun captured the spirit of the First Amendment when he wrote that,

The very reason for the First Amendment is to make the people of this country free to think, speak, write and worship, as they wish, not as the Government commands.[1]

The letter and spirit of the First Amendment protects not only free speech but also the citizen who speaks his mind.

Without deviation, without exception, without any ifs, buts, or whereases, freedom of speech means that you shall not do something to people either for the views they express, or the words they speak or write.

The Delegates were classicists. They knew well the world view of the Athenian Thucydides and Roman Tacitus, the philosophers of Athens and Rome, the speeches of Athenian Pericles, the letters, essays and fatherly advice of the great Cicero, Roman stoic and lawyer. They knew of a European Inquisition in which the beloved of God engaged in the testing, punishment and execution of hundreds of elderly women charged and convicted of witchcraft. Indeed, our own Salem Massachusetts has more than one witch’s skeleton in its closet.

Witches, of course, were easily recognized and condemned by the men of the Inquisition, men anointed by God, and entrusted by Him with human knowledge, its definition and perfection, its protection and distribution. They were the anointed infused with the metaphysical power to punish old women in league with the devil.What then are the tokens of the witch? She is an aged woman.She is unattractive, unprotected and therefore, an easy victim. Her body floats when cast into an icy river. She has a mole or other mark of Satan somewhere upon her body. Worse still, when one consults the highest authority on witchcraft the Malleus Maleficarum (Hammer of Witches), witchcraft also arises from sexual lust: Indeed, “All witchcraft,” wrote its author,

comes from carnal lust, which was in women insatiable.

While one is free to contest anyone’s opinion, the Left has adopted the ad homenum attack, a strategy of malice that resides in the sludge of an ancient rhetorical cesspool. The Ad Homenum attack does not seek to impeach the opinion expressed but to defame the one who expresses it. Russia for example harassed, tortured, imprisoned and finally banished the author Alexander Solzyetnichen because he wrote books exposing the murderous gulags of a malignant Communist Utopia. The Soviet apparatchiks, like modern Leftists, employed the techniques of the Inquisition: The Soviet Citizen, therefore, challenged Communist dogma at his peril.

Galileo Galilei, physicist, astronomer, and Father of Western Science, embraced and taught a Copernican, heliocentric model of the universe incompatible with the Catholic dogma that the sun and cosmos circumnavigated the earth. He was chastised, defamed anddenounced by the Roman Inquisition for opinions false and heretical. When later he sought to defend his theory, the Inquisition tried and condemned him,compelled his recantation and sentenced Galileo Galilei to life under house arrest.

While American Leftists may not be inclinedto pursue and burn witches or inspire the heretic’srecantation, as did the Inquisitioners of old, by showing him the instruments of torture, they nevertheless engage in the perpetration of their own politically correctdogma. Just as the Inquisition condemned those who would not buy into its theory of the universe, and just as the Soviet Union banished to Siberian gulags citizens who would not conform to its grandiose vision of a proletarian paradise, so Western Leftists intend to restrict freedom of speech to the dogma of political correctness. Their audacity is truly breathtaking. Leftists believe simply that they alone have the right and power to decide what every American must think, believe, speak and write—or else face the Inquisition.

One speaks against the ever-expanding dogmas of political correctness only at his peril. If one disagrees with the dogma of “radical” feminism, he is a chauvinist pig. If he criticizes the gay deconstruction of marriage he is a “homophobe.”If he is critical of foreign wars he is an “isolationist” and if not then a “war monger.” If he objects to racial quotas he is a racist. If he asks for President Obama’s long form birth certificate or a copy of his college records, he is a “Birther.” In each instance, the Leftist carefully chooses a libelous image calculated to end debate, demean the speaker and brow beat him into silence.Lately however, the tactic is not working. In a recent poll regarding President O’bama’s eligibility for office.

Not even one person in 10 believes Barack Obama has shown that he is eligible to be president of the United States, according to a stunning new scientific poll that also reveals political Independents have less tolerance than even Republicans for his efforts to obfuscate the issue.

The shocking result in this survey is that just 9 percent said they believe Obama has met the requirements to prove he was born in the United States and is therefore qualified to be president," said Fritz Wenzel, chief of Wenzel Strategies, which conducted the assessment "Even when you combine those who say such questions are not valid with those who believe he has satisfied the requirements, it still falls short of equaling the percentage who said he should step forward and prove his birth origin once and for all," he said. [2]

While this essay touches upon President Obama’s refusal to produce his college records, or his long form birth certificate, my theme is not his qualification for office; my theme is rhetorical and inquisitional fascism. President Obama’s obdurate refusal to produce an original long form birth certificate, or his college records, is not rational. The Democrats’ interminable reference to the president’s Certification of Live Birth does not meet the legitimate objection that one may obtain such a certificate without being born in Hawaii.

That a President of the United State has also refused to demonstrate the measure of his intelligence and qualifications by disclosingproof of his scholastic achievement in college and law school is a symbol of his presidential arrogance. We are inundated with the propaganda that President Obama is an “intellectual,” aConstitutional law professor, anda literary genius. Certainly then, it is not rational to condemn and defame those Americans who are simply curious about his college records and performance--and who are now suitably suspicious of a president who would rather hire attorneys and go to court than produce them.

It is now indisputable that millions of Americans, Democrats, Independents and Republicans alike, simply do not believe that O’bama was born in the United States. When one considers that former President George Bush won a national election against Al Gore by just over 700 votes, it hardly seems prudent that President Obama would continue to deny the quite ordinary request of several million American voters to see his college records. Indeed, whatever will he say to these Americans in 2012?

It is also relevant to ask why President Obama hasspent perhaps two million dollars to resist district court motions for production of documents that Americans have a right to ask of the man they have entrusted with the presidency. Shakespeare as always captures perfectly the American reaction to the president’s bizarre conduct. Marcellus’ line in Shakespeare’s Hamlet seems appropriate: Something is rotten in the State of Denmark.

It may be that the Left believed that the usual ridicule, excoriation and defamation of the speaker would, as it has in the past, put an end to American requests for a look at President O’bama’s college records and long form birth certificate. Rhetorically, however, the Left has already lost the contest.

For now it may be that Americans will wait for the November polls of 2012 when in an expression of poetic justice they may at last take the true measure of President Obama’s fitness for the presidency whether or not he discloses anything.